Monday, July 3, 2017

Russia Considering Introducing Islamic Banking to Get Around Western Sanctions

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 2 – Facing ever
greater difficulty in raising money in the West because of sanctions and calls
by its own growing Muslim population for such a step, Russian banks are now
considering the introduction of Islamic banking in order to gain access to
credit markets in the Muslim world.

Some
Muslim areas in the Russian Federation have been pushing this idea for the last
seven years, but now is the first time that it appears there is support in
Moscow for the idea, the paper says, although there are concerns about how such
a system would work in parallel with the existing mercantilist model.

But
because of the size of Islamic banking abroad – one to two trillion US dollars
now and slated to rise to four trillion in the coming years – financial experts
in the Russian capital says that “sooner or later,” Russia will take this step in
order to gain access to credit markets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Iran,
and eventually “even Syria.”

Indeed,
these experts say, the greatest obstacle to that are not financial arrangements
but the name, “Islamic” banking.Russia
is a secular state, and these experts say that businesses very negatively react
to any religiously based banking, be it the Orthodox kind Patriarch Kirill has
been talking about or Islamic banking now.